


Straight Man

by Toft



Category: MythBusters RPF
Genre: Coming Out, M/M, Queer Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-10
Updated: 2010-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 02:27:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/48712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toft/pseuds/Toft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jamie tells Adam something about himself. Adam perhaps doesn't react too well.</p><p>This is, I guess, pre-slash, or maybe pre-pre-slash, or queer gen. I've compromised with the archive labels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Straight Man

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to [](http://sasha-feather.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**sasha_feather**](http://sasha-feather.dreamwidth.org/) and [](http://wychwood.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**wychwood**](http://wychwood.dreamwidth.org/) for beta! And to [](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**thingswithwings**](http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/) for endless encouragement and enabling. Myyythbuuusteeers! This is totally not what I meant to write when I started writing Mythbusters fanfic. The next one will be madcap hi-jinks, I swear. But in this one, Jamie totally has an emotion. At least one!
> 
>  
> 
> Disclaimer: This made-up story is about Adam and Jamie the TV personas, and in no way reflects anything that happened in RL, to my knowledge!

They're in a meeting with their Discovery overlords. Adam's trying not to fidget too badly, and Jamie's Googling model airplane retailers in the San Francisco area, two little white laptop screens hovering on his glasses. As he half-listens to Philippa and Alice talk about ratings and the plan for the next Shark Week, Adam imagines using zoom vision to read the tiny text scrolling down over Jamie's eyes. Cyborg Jamie.

"No, look, no way is that going to work," he breaks in, abruptly tuning in. "Jamie's the straight man, we can't mess the viewers around like that."

Jamie clears his throat, his moustache twitching. "Adam, can I talk to you outside for a minute?"

Philippa and Alice raise their eyebrows in unison; Adam shrugs. He follows Jamie out into the corridor.

"Yeah, Jamie?"

"I'm actually bisexual," Jamie says.

Adam's had long enough to get used to Jamie's kicky sense of humour, and he snorts. But Jamie usually cracks up at his own jokes, but now he's just looking at him. Adam stops laughing, feeling that grinding sensation of his expectations misaligning. "Wait, really?" he says,"Seriously?"

"Sure," Jamie says, stilted and patient. Adam starts to laugh again, then stops again.

"Dude, Jamie, that's not - you know that's not what 'straight man' means, right?"

Jamie hesitates. His cheeks are pinking. "I know that," he says belatedly. "I just thought you ought to know, that's all."

Oh, Jamie, Jamie, so literal, Adam thinks, with helpless, bewildered irritation.

"You just thought this was the appropriate time to tell me that you're bisexual? In the middle of a business meeting about Shark Week?"

"I guess," says Jamie, and he folds his arms over his chest. The Hyneman Is Now Closed.

"Okay," Adam says slowly. "Can we -" he rubs his face, trying to get himself back on track. Man, he is completely derailed. "Can we just get back to the meeting and talk about this later?"

"What's to talk about?" Jamie says, deadpan.

"Let's just do this, okay?" Adam says, and opens the door before Jamie can say anything else. He's forgotten what they were talking about in here. "There's no problem," he says, in response to Philippa's raised eyebrow, "It's fine. Let's get this done. Shark week."

There's an awkward pause, then Philippa takes up where they left off, Jamie starts tapping away at the laptop again, face blank, and Adam tries to pay attention, but he can't stop looking at Jamie, who's bisexual. His Unified Theory of the Hyneman is now un-unified, dismembered, totally disintegrated in the face of newly available data. It is comprehensively shattered. Back to the drawing board. He's been working on that baby for, like, six years. He drums his hand on the desk.

*

"Were you really serious?" Adam says afterwards, when they're waiting for the coffee machine to heat up.

"Yeah," Jamie says, in that weird, half-belligerent, half-confused way he has. "Is there a problem?"

"No, of course not," Adam says, honestly offended. "But, what, you pick the middle of a business meeting to tell me? How about some time in the last six years, man?"

"I didn't think it was any of your business," Jamie says. He presses the plastic switch and carefully watches the brown liquid fill his cup, like he's waiting to see what it'll do.

"How can you even be bisexual?" Adam says, knowing Jamie wants to stop talking about it, but unable to let it go. He just cannot get his head around it. Jamie. Jamie dresses like he's in the special forces, eats gray nutrition paste and builds completely functional but totally unattractive killer robots for fun. And he paints model soldiers. Beret-wearing, salvage-diving, war-gaming Jamie, bisexual. Jamie did move to San Francisco, he supposes. He tries to imagine Jamie within a hundred miles of the San Francisco scene, and he comes up with a total blank. "I mean, you're - married!"

"What's that got to do with anything?" Jamie says, in that reasonable way that makes Adam insane.

"Well, how do you decide to stick with one gender for the rest of your life?" Adam says, drinking too fast and burning his mouth, but the caffeine shot direct to the brain is worth it. He grabs a donut.

"Same way you decide to stick with one person," Jamie says. "And anyway, I wasn't bisexual then."

Adam blinks. "How do you find out you're bisexual after you get married?"

"Being married doesn't stop you looking," Jamie says. "You looked, when you were married, didn't you?"

"Hey," snaps Adam, stung and surprised. Close to the _bone_, Hyneman, and he's always liked that Jamie never referred to Adam's relationship fuck-ups, that he can leave all that extraneous stuff at the door of M5. Jamie shrugs, that quizzical half-sneer on his face that he gets when he has to deal with people he doesn't really get or like, which is a lot of people, but not so often Adam. Adam loathes that look, fucking loathes it.

"Yeah, what?" says Jamie.

"That is none of your business!"

Jamie shrugs significantly, and Adam gets the point. He hates his mouth, sometimes.

"Yeah, okay, man, point taken."

Still, it kind of burns. Sure, he and Jamie don't hang out that much outside of work, they don't call each other to shoot the breeze or go for a drink at the weekend, but that's because they see each other _all the time_. It doesn't mean they aren't friends. Or at least, Adam didn't think so.

*

Later, he wanders into the workshop to find Jamie watching critically as Tory shaves bits of plastic off one of those tiny single-mould chairs they make for toddlers, and he finds himself watching Jamie watch Tory, wondering if Jamie's doing more than monitoring Tory's technique, if Jamie's _looking_. He's always been offended on behalf of Kari when people, usually asshole fans, suggest she's there for window dressing, and he will defend her to the last on that. He took her aside on her first day, and again before their first trade show, to assure her that if anyone, _anyone_ makes her feel uncomfortable, he has her back 100%; he's been super-careful to censor any hint of inappropriateness in himself, aware that he appreciates that she's hot, but she is a crucial part of the team and a valued co-worker, and he is a professional.

A lot of people in his industry are really, really bad with women, and one of the reasons he's come back to work with Jamie over and over is because Jamie has absolutely no problem treating his female employees exactly the same as his male ones, which is to say, he chews them out hard when they break his stuff, he's slow and methodical to the point of _madness_, and he's annoying as all hell and a good teacher. Robot Jamie eats nutrition paste for breakfast, lifts weights to think, polishes the door handles at 11pm and doesn't notice that Kari has breasts. It honest-to-god never occured to Adam that he should watch out for the boys, too. He wonders if Jamie's ever _looked_ at Tory, at Grant.

Part of the problem, Adam realizes later, is that it's weird to think of Jamie being a sexually active human being; it kind of freaks Adam out in a way he can't really quantify, like when he realized that his parents had sex to make him, or when he saw his old English teacher at the mall. Adam always kind of assumed that Jamie and Joan just hooked a USB cable between their heads sometimes, but Jamie is married, and, presumably, in a happy and fulfilling relationship with his wife. Jamie doesn't seem to go home that much, although he and Joan go on holiday once a year, every year, in the first two weeks of August. He sees Jamie on his cell at work sometimes, talking quietly, he assumes to her. Adam's met her, like, five times. He wonders if she knows Jamie's bi, what she thinks about it. God, he's obsessing. He's going to go home and have a beer.

He wonders if Jamie's ever _looked_ at him.

*

When he tells her about it later, when he's picking up the boys, Dawn chokes on her tea and coughs, "Jamie _came out to you_ in a _business meeting_?"

It occurs to Adam that Jamie did, in fact, come out to him, and that he may have behaved like an asshole.

*

"Hey, I behaved like an asshole to you yesterday, I'm sorry," Adam says formally, as they watch the test-tube go through seven rotations in two minutes, the rig's tiny motor buzzing self-importantly. It's taken him a few hours to work up to it, but he can do these things properly.

"Okay," Jamie says. Adam tries to make himself not get annoyed at the implication that Jamie did think he was an asshole, and reminds himself that he was an asshole, that's why he's apologizing. But Jamie doesn't have to be such an asshole about it. Adam's leg is bouncing with irritation. Jamie looks at Adam, then looks down at Adam's thigh. "Could you stop that?" he says.

Adam flashes on Jamie putting his hand on his knee, pressing down to still him. "Make me, Hyneman," he growls, à la De Niro, to mask his shock at the heat turning over in his stomach.

Jamie hesitates, then says doubtfully, "Do you want me to punch you in the face or something?"

Adam bursts out laughing in spite of himself, and forces his leg still. He has to drum his fingers instead, but he keeps his hand under the table.

"Jeez, will you just go outside or chew some gum or something?" Jamie says, after a few minutes. "You're like a four-year-old."

Adam shoves his chair back with relief, because he can feel the warmth of Jamie's leg near his even though they aren't touching, and he doesn't know what the hell is wrong with him today. Maybe he needs a cookie.

*

Jamie's sketching, and Adam's bouncing a ball against the wall. They're alone, but on camera, which Adam is always acutely aware of, like a buzz at the back of his neck. What if they - _thok_ \- changed the parameters - _thok_ \- to accommodate for varying - _thok_ \- wind speeds - _thok_ -

Jamie raises his hand suddenly and takes the ball out of the air with an economy of motion that's like the most perfect of his machines. He puts it in his desk drawer. "You shouldn't play with that in here, you could damage the equipment," he says.

"My equipment is just fine," Adam retorts automatically, then Jamie smirks.

"You keep telling yourself that."

To his shock, Adam feels his face heat up, and, cursing himself, tries to hide his flusterment by making a paper airplane out of a printout of price comparisons. They joke like this all the time, on- and off-camera. He never thought it _meant_ anything, and now he feels like everything he says gets scrambled between his brain and his mouth, and comes out wrong, and he suddenly wonders how people see them, how they seem together. Do people think - what is he saying, he knows people think, it's the internet, but do people - God, he needs to get laid or something, he's obsessing, and it's stupid, it's _Jamie_. His airplane's wings are crooked, so he unfolds it and starts to refold, but its line is ruined already.

"Your finger's bleeding," Jamie says sharply. Adam looks down at it. There's a thin, fine papercut running down the side of Adam's index finger, and a red dot on his wing. Adam crumples his plane into the trash and licks his finger, but Jamie's already heading for the first-aid cupboard.

"Oh, for crying out loud, Jamie -"

Although Adam gets a kick out of making Jamie seem like a giant prude on camera, Jamie's actually pretty unselfconscious about how he appears on the show. One thing - nearly the only thing - he's put his foot down about, is letting them show how much he hates blood. Adam's seen Jamie nearly die for real several times, but the only time he's seen him really freaked out - like, white as a sheet, looking like he might throw up - was when Adam cut his leg pretty badly on a rogue spring, back at ILM. Adam tries to be nice and not give Jamie a hard time about it. He'd probably be as anal about safety if blood freaked him out that much.

"I don't want you coming crying to me when you get gangrene and your finger falls off," Jamie says. He tears open a band-aid for him, like Adam can't do it himself, but Adam notices that when he hands it over, he's careful not to let their fingers brush. Adam puts on the band-aid as Jamie watches, hands on his hips, almost proprietary.

"Make sure you don't pull it too tight."

"Yes, dear," Adam mutters, then nearly bites his tongue. Luckily, he's pretty sure this isn't going to make it to air. He has a good instinct for that, usually.

Later, to satisfy his curiosity, although he's not really sure what he's looking for, he watches some of the rushes from that day. He watches himself and Jamie bickering about firing trajectories. At one point, Adam watches himself reach out - subconsciously, he doesn't remember it - for Jamie's arm, and Jamie moves out of the way. Adam keeps on talking, Jamie keeps on talking. He wonders if they've always been like that, if Jamie's always backed away from Adam pushing, and Adam just never noticed, or if Adam's been pushing more, lately, without realizing; it suddenly occurs to him that this whole thing could be some weird way of Jamie telling him to back off. He shakes that off. Jamie doesn't do that kind of manipulation, probably doesn't know how. If Jamie wanted something, he'd either come right out and say it, or never say anything at all. He thinks that's true. He's almost sure.

The thing is, Adam thinks, watching himself hold the rig in place while Jamie nails down the boards, the thing is that he's actually never been in a relationship that's worked as well, for as long, as him and Jamie. And now he's not sure if he knows Jamie at all.

*

They're having a good day. On a roll and riding the high, Adam turns to Jamie. "Well, Jamie, while you were shedding a few tears chopping onions, Grant and I were setting up our firing range rig. Your eyes cleared up? You finished crying?"

"I didn't cry," Jamie says. "I mean, they got a little watery, but -"

"Oh, he cried," says Tory, "He cried like a baby."

Adam reaches over to take off Jamie's glasses, knowing Jamie'll hate it, and, sure enough, Jamie flinches way back and dodges around the table before Adam's even halfway there.

"Come on, Hyneman, let's see the evidence," Adam yells as Roberto follows Jamie with the camera. Jamie stands stiffly on the other side of the big work-table and blinks into the zoom. Adam leans in as close as Jamie will let him, and makes a show of examining Jamie's face. Slowly, Jamie takes off his glasses and looks at him, eyes pale and owlish. The gesture leaves Adam shaken, not knowing why.

Adam forces his best leer. "Yo' eyes sho' are pretty, Miss Hyneman."

Jamie scrunches up his face and puts his glasses back on. "Well," he says. "It's been a while since I got called pretty by a guy holding a shotgun."

"Not since you jumped parole in an all-girl jazz band and got stopped by those troopers at the state line, right?" says Adam, as Grant guffaws behind them.

"Right," Jamie says. "Something like that."

*

Adam's never admitted this to anyone, but when he was twelve, he had a really, wildly intense hero-worship thing for Freddie Mercury that would probably, by any objective definition, be called a crush. He taped _Bohemian Rhapsody_ off the TV and watched it until the picture was white and fuzzy, he covered a wall with _Queen_ posters, he memorized the lyrics to all their songs and drove his parents crazy singing them about the house, and he stopped talking to his best friend Benny for a week when Benny told him Freddie was gay.

"I don't know why you didn't tell me," he said to Freddie that night, borrowing his lines wholesale from the movie his mom had been watching earlier, because it had sounded grown-up and real, like the feeling in Adam's chest. "You can tell me anything. I thought we were friends." It was the hottest August for a decade, and they didn't have air conditioning then; the windows were as open as the bug screens would allow, but the room was airless, and Adam had been wrung-out with heat and unsettled, unhappy. Freddie had stared back, huge and impossibly beautiful. In the middle of the night, Adam got up and tore down all his posters in a fit of rage, near tears; the next morning, he taped together his favourite and folded it carefully away in his sweater drawer, then threw away the others and moved his poster of the periodic table to the center of his wall instead, to make it look less empty.

Later, when he kept his _Playboys_ hidden in his sweater drawer too, he'd sometimes accidentally take out the picture instead, and was jolted by Freddie's soulful stare as he rummaged for Becki's centerfold. He thought, every time, that he should move the poster somewhere else, and felt vaguely bad about leaving Freddie with all those naked women. But he somehow never did move it, until he went to college, and threw the whole pile away, because he was planning to find a girlfriend as soon as he got there. It isn't something he thinks about much, these days.

*

"Oh, Jamie, don't stop!" Adam moans breathily, as Jamie screws the length of pipe into the propeller harness which Adam's holding still between his knees. Jamie looks up at him, that startled half-sneer on his face. Then he puts down the pipe, stands up, and turns to Roberto. "Shut the camera off," he says. Roberto does. Then he and James the Sound Guy walk out and shut the door behind them. Oh, boy, Adam's in trouble.

"Stop it," Jamie says.

"Stop what?"

"You know what."

"No, I don't know what," Adam mimics. Jamie wants to play chicken, he can play chicken all day.

"You didn't get all bent out of shape about Grant."

Adam double-takes. "That was - that was different!"

Jamie's gaze levels him off, razes him down. "How?"

"I - no! I'm _fine_ with the gay thing, Jamie, you know I'm not like that, this is about you not telling me something for six years! This is a trust thing," he says triumphantly. Jamie isn't impressed.

"What, because I'm bisexual you can't trust me, now?"

"Oh, come on, that is not fair, Jamie -"

"You being a jerk to me on national television's not fair."

"I was kidding around! We always kid around!"

"Not like this. You're being mean."

"I am not being _mean_!" Adam snaps, shocked. "You're just being super fucking sensitive because you're embarrassed you told me something you didn't mean to tell me -"

"You didn't need to know."

Adam yells, "What if I _wanted_ to know?"

"Why, you got the hots for me now, or something?" Jamie sneers, and Adam leaves, just leaves.

*

(Grant had come to Adam first, before he brought Javier to the wrap party, and Adam had been proud of that. Grant had said, _Jamie won't be weird about it, right?_ Adam had said, _nah, he'll be fine_. But he'd had to think about it.)

*

"Look, Jamie, can I talk to you?" Adam says. Jamie looks up from his calculator.

"I guess," he says, and waits.

Adam swallows, then blurts out, even though it's totally not what he meant to say, "Are we even friends?"

Jamie hesitates. He hesitates some more. Adam abruptly loses his temper, without warning at all, and throws his University of Michigan **Go Science!** cup onto the floor. It smashes. Jamie leaps to his feet and walks over quickly, grabbing the broom on the way. He starts sweeping around Adam's feet in sharp, jerky movements, but his voice is just as flat as usual when he says, "Why did you do that?"

"I don't," Adam says, rubbing his head furiously. "I - look, it's a simple fucking question."

"It's not a simple fucking question," Jamie mimics, putting weird stress on _fucking_, or maybe it only sounds like that because Jamie never swears. Adam's stomach flips. He has no idea if Jamie meant it, if Jamie even means anything Adam thinks he does, ever, but his mind picks up on it like an echo anyway, and it gets stuck. A simple fucking _question_, a simple _fucking_ question. Jamie dumps the shards of cup into the trash. He keeps sweeping, then bends to pick up an invisible piece of ceramic.

"You going to apologise for breaking my cup?" Jamie says, still not looking up. Adam feels like a sore thumb, standing there while Jamie picks at the floor, crouched on the balls of his feet.

"That's my cup, Jamie."

"Yours has a chip on the handle, Adam," Jamie says, the mimicry finally giving his voice a hostile edge that makes Adam feel kind of exultant and sick at the same time. "That one was mine."

Adam doesn't even believe they had two of those cups, but he knows if he tells Jamie that, Jamie will march him across the building to the kitchen to prove it, and he'll be right, and the idea irritates Adam as much as if it had all actually happened. Jamie is still scrutinizing the concrete, like he can find bits of china at the atomic level with his zoom vision. His shoulders are square and stiff. Adam can't tell if he's angry about the mess, or Adam breaking his cup, or having his work interrupted, or - is he even angry? It's usually easy to tell when they're fighting, because they disagree, and Jamie's a stubborn jerk and Adam yells a lot, and then Jamie gets his way and is usually right. But Jamie doesn't ever raise his voice, and Adam never realized how frustrating that is until now. He wonders how Joan deals with it. Maybe they just never fight.

"Go away," Jamie says, toneless. "I'm working."

Adam comes back ten minutes later, tugged by the sick feeling in his stomach, maybe to apologize, maybe to break something else. Jamie's kneeling on the floor, wiping at the same spot with a wet cloth, making slow, methodical circles, over and over again. Adam watches him for a minute, until his throat starts to hurt from all the stuff he can't think how to say, doesn't even know where to start. _Jamie, do you even feel any sensations at all in interaction with me on a day-to-day basis? _

Without looking up, Jamie says, "I told you to go away."

Adam goes.

He looks at U of M's online store, later, but they've changed the design of the cups. He can't even find one on ebay. He doesn't sleep, and he feels like he's making a mess of his life, without really knowing how or why.

*

He walks into the workshop early in the morning on the Sunday, when there's nobody around, but he thinks Jamie'll be there. He is. He's cutting some plastic sheeting down into small equilateral triangles, to a pattern Adam doesn't recognise. Adam watches him for a while, hypnotized by the motion of the saw, the smooth arc of the plastic under Jamie's hands. Jamie's totally focused; Adam could stand here for hours, and Jamie would probably never look up and see him. There's something reassuring about it, somehow.

"Hey," Adam says, after a while, when Jamie pauses to get more plastic.

"Hey," Jamie says, with a little jump, but Adam's made sure his hands are well away from the saw. "I didn't see you."

"What're you doing?"

"Breaking in the new blade," Jamie says, and cuts the power.

"How is it?"

"It's fine."

He sits down on the bench and starts to wipe his hands on the cloth, and Adam goes to sit down beside him, a careful distance. Jamie doesn't flinch away, and doesn't say anything, just keeps rubbing at a patch of grease on his thumb. Adam takes a deep breath, then watches with a sense of helplessness as his own hand reaches over and his fingers brush over Jamie's wrist, then slide up to press against Jamie's fingers, his palm.

Jamie looks down at their joined hands. He doesn't move, but he doesn't move away.

"Is this one of those things you do which are really stupid but you do them anyway to see what happens?"

Jamie says 'stupid' like he means it, 'stoopid'. Adam wonders how he forgot that Jamie knows him really fucking well, too. He wonders if Jamie has a Unified Theory of the Savage, if he's been working away at it for six years, entering data, drawing up results.

Adam says, "Yeah, I guess this is one of those things." His heart's still running on overdrive, so fast it aches. He's tired and an idiot, and he breaks everything.

Jamie pauses, then he intertwines their fingers and strokes his forefinger down the ridge of Adam's thumb. His shoulder brushes against Adam's as he breathes.

"It's what makes you a good designer," he says. "I admire that about you."

Adam blinks, speechless.

"I'm - married," Jamie says. He's still looking at their hands. "I respect my wife. I don't cheat."

"Oh," Adam says, his voice coming out mangled. "Oh, hey." Guilt twists in his chest all at once as the last couple of weeks slot back into perspective, and the world's the right way around again, even if it kind of hurts this way. "I know, I know that, Jamie." He squeezes Jamie's big, warm hand once, and lets go. Jamie takes his hand back quickly, and rubs at it.

"I'm -" Adam says, and Jamie says, "You want to light a refrigerator on fire?"

"Yes," Adam says, quickly and with great relief, "Yes, I would like that."

Jamie nods seriously, his eyes crinkling. "I'll get the accelerant."

Adam goes to set up the blast screens, without being asked.

"Hey, thanks," Jamie says, when he comes back and sees the Lexan walls in place. He sounds surprised.

Adam hesitates, then asks, "Why can't you just admit you're Captain Safety because you hate the sight of blood?"

"I'm Captain Safety because my partner sticks his face and hands into live machinery just for the heck of it and scares the crap out of me," Jamie says.

"Oh," says Adam, after a moment. "Your partner sounds like an idiot. Why do you put up with that guy?"

"I like his hair," Jamie says.

Adam's laughing too hard to release the trigger right away, but Jamie waits, and lets him push the button.

The End


End file.
